Anyway, that’s my last post on this thread.

Here’s a link: Ticking bomb

Ah, and I’m reminded of this event, celebrated every year for 7 days in a row:

Exodus 11:4-8, 12:29-30

So Moses said, “This is what the Lord says: ‘About midnight I will go throughout Egypt. Every firstborn son in Egypt will die, from the firstborn son of Pharaoh, who sits on the throne, to the firstborn son of the slave girl, who is at her hand mill, and all the firstborn of the cattle as well. There will be loud wailing throughout Egypt-worse than there has ever been or ever will be again. But among the Israelites not a dog will bark at any man or animal.’ Then you will know that the Lord makes a distinction between Egypt and Israel. All these officials of yours will come to me, bowing down before me and saying, ‘Go, you and all the people who follow you!’ After that I will leave.” Then Moses, hot with anger, left Pharaoh.

At midnight the Lord struck down all the firstborn in Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh, who sat on the throne, to the firstborn of the prisoner, who was in the dungeon, and the firstborn of all the livestock as well. Pharaoh and all his officials and all the Egyptians got up during the night, and there was loud wailing in Egypt, for there was not a house without someone dead.

On Palestine, you won’t get any argument from me about how bad the Israelis have been. I just don’t think ethnic cleansing, apartheid, torture and indisriminate killing by one side justifies the deliberate murder of children by the other. Or vice versa. Of course as Americans we’ve been funding one set of crimes.

As for the community center thread, no comment. You two really don’t seem to get along.

On the Rwanda thing: who knows? We will never know.

But read this, by general Lewis MacKenzie, commander of the UN peacekeeping forces in Sarajevo. First he’s fantasizing about how everything would’ve been different if he had 150,000 troops, and then:

…With some help from outsiders, they [Bosnian Muslims] began to infiltrate thousands of fighters and weapons into the safe haven. As the Bosnian Muslim fighters became better equipped and trained, they started to venture outside Srebrenica, burning Serb villages and killing their occupants before quickly withdrawing to the security provided by the UN’s safe haven. These attacks reached a crescendo in 1994 and carried on into early 1995 after the Canadian infantry company that had been there for a year was replaced by a larger Dutch contingent.

[...]As the snow cleared in the spring of 1995, it became obvious to Nasar Oric, the man who led the Bosnian Muslim fighters, that the Bosnian Serb army was going to attack Srebrenica to stop him from attacking Serb villages. So he and a large number of his fighters slipped out of town. Srebrenica was left undefended with the strategic thought that, if the Serbs attacked an undefended town, surely that would cause NATO and the UN to agree that NATO air strikes against the Serbs were justified.

This is a fact, this is what actually happened leading to the 1995 Srebrenica massacre. That’s what I’m talking about.

BTW, you and I were just about to fly at each other’s throats in an earlier thread, where I was condemning both Palestinian corruption and terror and Israeli war crimes and apartheid, and you jumped on me for it. Then the thread was shut down, darn it.

Seriously? You agree that “it is disgusting – and also dangerous – that there should be such things as ‘Asian Community Centres’ or ‘Black Community Centres’ rather than ‘Community Centres’?”

Disgusting and dangerous? Isn’t it loony-radical to the point of absurdity?

Now, here’s a piece on GG’s troubles in a honest leftwing paper: Unspinning the US’s web of lies against Galloway.

Jet, I don’t have the sources handy, but the US cheered when Iraq attacked Iran

Actually, we did a lot more than that. We actively encouraged Saddam to invade, and Carter gave him an explicit green light to do so. (See point #5, here.)

Beyond that, jet’s understanding of what we actually did during the Iran-Iraq war is on par with his knowledge of our policy vis-a-vis the sanctions; ie, practically non-existent. But I learned long ago there’s no use in trying to help people understand things they don’t want to know.